Roth IRA recharacterized money not counted correctly

[nealnye28]

I don't understand how the 'IRA Contribution Results' page calculated its numbers. It seems to be double-counting the recharacterized dollars.
The situation:
2016 Roth contributions = $4000
Amount to recharacterize = $1020
2016 Trad. contributions = $123

TurboTax reports:
Traditional IRA contributions $1,143
Roth IRA contributions $1,960
Total contributions $3,103


This doesn't make sense to me. I contributed $4,123, so shouldn't I see that as the total amount of contrilbution?

[dmertz · Accepted solution]

When entering the Roth IRA contribution, make sure that you enter $4,000 as your Roth IRA contribution and then in the follow-up indicate that you recharacterized $1,020 of that.  The result that you are seeing suggests that you entered only the $2,980 of net Roth IRA contributions rather than $4,000 that you should have.

[nealnye28]

Thanks for the quick reply. Actually I did exactly as you suggested, putting $4000 as the Roth IRA contribution and then putting $1020 on the next page when it asks about re-characterization. That's why I'm confused about the final result.  Is there a way to clear out existing data and starting over for a particular section?

[dmertz]

Everything can be cleared by deleting the IRA Contributions Worksheet:  Click My Account -> Tools -> Delete a form, then click the Delete link next to IRA Contrib Wks.

First, though, it would be informative to find out where things went wrong.  You might find that you also entered a $1,020 return of contribution prior to deciding to recharacterize to a traditional IRA instead.  In fact, I'll bet that that is what happened since I can reproduce your result this way.  That would appear as $1,020 on line 26 of the IRA Contrib Wks.  Unfortunately, with no excess contribution remaining, TurboTax will not present the step-by-step page that would allow you to delete the indication that you will have $1,020 of the contribution returned.

Before the deleting the IRA Contrib Wks, try this to force TurboTax to display the potentially offending entry:  Change your Roth IRA contribution entry from $4,000 to $10,000 to ensure that TurboTax detects an excess contribution.  Proceed to the You Currently Have a Penalty page where I bet you'll see $1,020 that you need to delete.  After deleting the $1,020 entry here, go back though and change the $10,000 back to the correct amount of $4,000.

[nealnye28]

Bingo! That's it, you solved it!

[jaclaeys]

I had the exact same problem ... This most recent entry solved it.   Seems like a software bug for TT to fix.